On 'Non-Sexual Pornographers'

There are some auteurs whose works are – while largely erotica-free – overtly designed to gratify a certain sector of entertainment consumers. They create works which “get people off”. I call these folks "Non-Sexual Pornographers".

7) Dan Brown

Target arousees: Religious Skeptics, Conspiracy Theorists

Author of The Davinci Code, Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol, Brown unabashedly shows you what Indiana Jones would have been if there was no divine power in the Arc or the Grail. Atheists and Illuminati speculators get their revenge on sacred institutions with each of these best-sellers.



6) M. Night Shyamalan

Target arousees: Twilight Zone fans.

While Shyamalan would love to be remembered as the second coming of Alfred Hitchcock, his canon pays more devotion to Rod Serling. It's interesting that The Twilight Zone was such a critically acclaimed and popular hit, while Shyamalan’s name alone draws laughs from cinema crowds. Perhaps mind-bending alternate-universe mythology has a half-life of 15 minutes..? Most of Sham’s flicks would make cool half hour TV-shows, but the average moviegoer simply doesn't want to spend 11 bucks for a two-hour fantasy riddle. Still, some Zone fanatics find his films un-missable.


5) Michael Bay

Target arousees: Pyromaniacs

Did you ever wonder whether an explosion could play the lead character in a film? Most people don’t. Most people fail to see any human complexity in a ball of flame. This is simply because they’re not using their imagination. In a Michael Bay film, an explosion can be everything. It can be a mushroom cloud symbolizing a tertiary character’s past with psychedelic drugs. It can be an exploding car, symbolizing the looming threat of the technological singularity. It can simply be the spontaneous combustion of a factory, showing us the threat of anti-union de-regulation. If you get your rocks off on massive plumes of flame, Michael Bay’s films probably have posters located on your bedroom ceiling.

4) Clint Eastwood

Target arousee: Clint Eastwood

Remember that movie about the old-fashioned Korean war vet whose humanity shone through to over-come his prejudices as he bad-assedly defended neighborhood families against gang members?

How about the old-fashioned boxing coach whose humanity shone through to over-come his sexism and ageism as he trained a young woman, eventually becoming like a father to her? A father so filled with humanity that he was able to compassionately help her pull the plug after she became paralyzed and life-support bound?

Clint Eastwood’s master plan is to take the best qualities of previous generations and combine them with the best qualities of modern America to demonstrate the ultimate human being: Clint Eastwood. He even made sure to attach his name to Nelson Mandella’s legacy with Invictus. The only reason he didn’t play Nelson Mandella is presumably because he couldn’t feign interest in Rugby.

3) Oliver Stone

Target arousee: Everybody

If you have a particular interest in anything, and Oliver Stone is making a movie about it, congratulations! Because you have basically won the lottery. If you’re a Doors fan, he made the “Doorsiest” movie humanly possible. If you have strong feelings about Vietnam, he made–not necessarily the best, but certainly the “Vietnamiest” war movie ever. 9-11? Oh, he WENT there (twice, if you count “W”). If you think Kennedy’s assassination was a coup, cover-up, conspiracy, or anything other than the work of a disgruntled whack-job, then he made your favorite movie of all time. If Quentin Tarantino is your favorite film-maker, then guess what? Stone had no problem taking an unusable Tarantino script (Natural Born Killers) and forcing it to life, just for the sheer archival of it.

Some people say “nothing is sacred” with Oliver Stone, but the truth is the complete opposite. Nothing is NOT sacred! Everything is--in fact--SO SACRED, that he’s going to make a three hour major studio picture about it. When Oliver Stone’s involved, nothing less will do.


2) Nicholas Sparks

Target arousees: Women

This romance author has plenty of credits to show his unabashed placation of women’s emotions, including Dear John and A Walk to Remember. But his masterwork–The Notebook–voluptuously caresses the prototypical female’s ideal of romance. The Notebook gives girls everything they could possibly ask for out of the very concept of love, transcending it above body, mind, God, matter, and physics.


1) Quentin Tarantino

Target arousees: Revenge Fantasizers, 70′s Pop-Culture Nostalgics, Foot Fetishists, Wannabe Bad-Asses.

Quentin Tarantino is by far the most gratuitous film-maker on the planet. If you’ve daydreamed about it on the last day of school before summer vacation, he’s filmed it. Jewish-American soldiers torturing and killing Nazis by the dozen? Check. Chicks beating up a creepy serial-killer after powning him in a car-chase? Check. Uma Thurman’s feet for such an enduring close-up that Kill Bill had to be released in two parts? Check.

There’s almost no moment in any Tarantino film that doesn’t satiate some type of young man’s brain saying, “yo, how bad-ass would THIS be…” Hell, his creation of Jules in Pulp Fiction more or less invented the modern bad-ass.

Do you think it’d be cool if two mortal enemies found a common ground in killing a pair of redneck rapists? Or if stylish criminals wore suits and maintained a code of ethics even while breaking the law? Tarantino’s catalog is filled with the greatest (and most) non-sexual money-shots in film history.

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